[In honor of May
Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in
American history and identity.]
On the
masterpiece of a poem that destroys easy “us vs. them” narratives.
I made the case
for my favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, in one
of my first posts, and did so in large part through her best poem, “The
Palace-Burner” (1873). There are a lot of factors that make “Palace-Burner”
one of the great American poems, including its exemplification of Piatt’s frequent
use of a unique and multi-layered perspective that I named in my
first book the dialogic lyric, an individual speaker’s perspective filtered
through conversation and the shifts and evolutions it always produces. But at
the top of the list for me would be Piatt’s incredibly sophisticated
representation—through the lens of a mother and young son discussing a newspaper
picture of a female rebel from the 1871
Paris Commune—of what I called in this
post three crucial and interconnected levels to empathy: “connecting to seemingly distant others, working to understand those to
whom we’re close, and examining our own identities through those lenses.”
This wasn’t necessarily the case in the 1870s (although given the
immense popularity of Horatio Alger novels in the period, maybe it
was), but over the century and a half since I would say that there have been
few world communities with which Americans have had, collectively, a more difficult
time empathizing than communists. Of course there are significant exceptions,
both in terms of time periods during which that philosophy has seemed more
appealing (such as the Great Depression, about which more in tomorrow’s post)
and in terms of American communities who have been sufficiently disenfranchised
from our dominant national narratives to see the wisdom of such alternatives
(such as African Americans in the mid-20th century, on whom likewise
more tomorrow). But when it comes to our overarching, dominant narratives, communism
has been one of the most consistent “them’s” to our constructed “us” for a long
while; we can see both sides of that equation, for example, in our consistent need
to define
the Soviet Union as “godless” in contrast to equally constructed images
of the United States as a “Christian nation.”
There would be various possible ways to complicate and revise that
kind of “us vs. them” narrative, including highlighting the many originating and influential
forms and moments of American
socialism and communism. But Piatt takes another, and to my mind particularly
compelling, tack: creating in her poetic speaker a woman who seems thoroughly
removed from not only communism but political conversations in general
(especially in the “separate spheres” mentality that
continued to reign for most middle-class American families in the period); and
then giving that speaker the opportunity to consider whether and how she and a foreign
communist woman might have anything in common. Neither the speaker nor the poem
come to any easy or comfortable answers—empathy is neither of those things in
any case—but they ask the questions, and that seems to me to an impressive
model for all of us.
Next cultural
communism tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?
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